Saturday, December 31, 2016

I generally have at least half a dozen books going at one time. In hardback I'm reading:

Glitter by Aprilynne Pike. Set in a future Paris, yet Versailles is owned by a corporation that still lives the 17th century lifestyle (yes, even with the poufy wigs and gowns) yet mixes well with robots. Glitter is a drug, and it's making for...[read on]

About A Venetian Vampire, from the publisher:

Some games are better without rules…especially when it comes to seduction.

Vampire Dante D'Arcangelo enjoys diversions. Especially those that involve seducing beautiful women, like newly made vampiress Kyler Cole. The curvaceous ingenue stirs Dante's deepest desires. But they share more than blistering chemistry. Dante and Kyler each seek possession of a priceless Fabergé egg containing a spell that would annihilate thousands of vampires while granting only one eternal life.

Caught up in a wickedly sexy game of cat and mouse, Dante and Kyler try to outmaneuver each other as thieves and as lovers. But when a rival steals the egg, they form a wary alliance to recover it…knowing that their delicate bond must eventually end in betrayal.

At the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog Jeff Somers tagged ten top books with fictional apocalypses...and gave them a plausibility grade. One title on the list:

On the Beach, by Nevil Shute

Nuclear war is, sadly, still one of the most likely ways civilization and all human life could end on the planet. Set largely in Australia as the population awaits a huge cloud of deadly radiation stemming from a nuclear war in the Northern Hemisphere, the story remains a gripping and horrifying glimpse of an end of the world that could still happen—at any time.

“I do not say you are it, but you look it, and you pose at it, which is just as bad,” Lord Queensbury challenged Oscar Wilde in the courtroom—which erupted in laughter—accusing Wilde of posing as a sodomite. What was so terrible about posing as a sodomite, and why was Queensbury’s horror greeted with such amusement? In Oscar Wilde Prefigured, Dominic Janes suggests that what divided the two sides in this case was not so much the question of whether Wilde was or was not a sodomite, but whether or not it mattered that people could appear to be sodomites. For many, intimations of sodomy were simply a part of the amusing spectacle of sophisticated life.

Oscar Wilde Prefigured is a study of the prehistory of this “queer moment” in 1895. Janes explores the complex ways in which men who desired sex with men in Britain had expressed such interests through clothing, style, and deportment since the mid-eighteenth century. He supplements the well-established narrative of the inscription of sodomitical acts into a homosexual label and identity at the end of the nineteenth century by teasing out the means by which same-sex desires could be signaled through visual display in Georgian and Victorian Britain. Wilde, it turns out, is not the starting point for public queer figuration. He is the pivot by which Georgian figures and twentieth-century camp stereotypes meet. Drawing on the mutually reinforcing phenomena of dandyism and caricature of alleged effeminates, Janes examines a wide range of images drawn from theater, fashion, and the popular press to reveal new dimensions of identity politics, gender performance, and queer culture.

Melville's magnificent prose epic is at once a superb sea yarn and a profound critique of Yahweh, source of the unwarranted suffering of Job. I cannot think of any other American fictive prose as memorable and transfixing as that with which Melville constructs his tragic vision of Captain Ahab.

A luminous and insightful novel that considers the moral complexities of scientific discovery and the sustaining nature of love.

A young researcher at MIT, Jane Weiss is obsessed with finding the genetic marker for Valentine’s Disease, a neurodegenerative disorder. Her pursuit is deeply personal—Valentine’s killed her mother, and she and her freewheeling sister, Laurel, could be genetic carriers; each has a fifty percent chance of developing the disease. Having seen firsthand the devastating effect Valentine’s had on her parents’ marriage, Jane is terrified she might become a burden on whomever she falls in love with and so steers clear of romantic entanglement. Then, the summer before her father’s second wedding, Jane falls hard for her future stepbrother, Willie. But Willie’s father also died from Valentine’s, raising the odds that their love will end in tragedy.

When Willie bolts at a crucial moment in their relationship, Jane becomes obsessed with finding the genetic marker to the disease that threatens both their families. But if she succeeds in making history, will she and her sister have the courage to face the truth this newfound knowledge could hold for their lives? A Perfect Life is a novel of scientific and self discovery, about learning how to embrace life and love, no matter what may come. Eileen Pollack conjures a thought-provoking, emotionally resonant story of one woman’s brilliance and bravery as she confronts her deepest fears and desires—and comes to accept the inevitable and the unexpected.

Smith’s insanely creative book begins on New Year’s Day and explores, among many other finely woven themes, how chance affects our lives. When Archie Jones changes his mind about an attempted suicide and finds his way to the dregs of a New Year’s Eve party, where he meets his future wife, it’s just the first of many ways the book celebrates how our decisions conspire to surprise us—and the story circles around to a later New Year’s to underscore the point. Read this book before making your resolutions, to remind yourself that you never know what 2015 might throw at you.

Authors go about creating characters in many different ways. My basic process is figuring out their names, ages, family and friends, educational backgrounds, hobbies, interests, clothing preferences and so on. Their physical descriptions, and the way their voices sound, come to me as I work through their traits and interests. I form a mental image of each of them, and envision and hear them speak when I write.

In the Snow Globe Shop Mysteries, Camryn Brooks has returned to her small hometown of Brooks Landing, Minnesota after getting fired from her position as a Director of Legislative Affairs in Washington D.C. She’s independent and spunky, and feels like a fish out of water working in her parents’ Curio Finds shop after living for many years in big cities. On the other hand, she loves being close to family and friends again.

Cami’s one fun claim to fame is she can transform herself into a believable-looking Marilyn Monroe for costume parties. Her...[read on]

One of the earliest examples of a mistake in an otherwise great book occurs when the most famous castaway in literature first finds himself on the Island of Despair. Seeing that the ship whose wreck he’s just survived is going down, he strips down naked and swims out to retrieve supplies…which he carries back to shore by shoving them into his pockets. This mistake doesn’t really ruin the story, but it’s still amusing to think that novels have been exporting mistakes into the world for nearly three centuries.

This "historically engaging and pressingly relevant" biography establishes Shirley Jackson as a towering figure in American literature and revives the life and work of a neglected master.

Still known to millions primarily as the author of the "The Lottery," Shirley Jackson (1916–1965) has been curiously absent from the mainstream American literary canon. A genius of literary suspense and psychological horror, Jackson plumbed the cultural anxiety of postwar America more deeply than anyone. Now, biographer Ruth Franklin reveals the tumultuous life and inner darkness of the author of such classics as The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

Placing Jackson within an American Gothic tradition that stretches back to Hawthorne and Poe, Franklin demonstrates how her unique contribution to this genre came from her focus on "domestic horror." Almost two decades before The Feminine Mystique ignited the women’s movement, Jackson’ stories and nonfiction chronicles were already exploring the exploitation and the desperate isolation of women, particularly married women, in American society. Franklin’s portrait of Jackson gives us “a way of reading Jackson and her work that threads her into the weave of the world of words, as a writer and as a woman, rather than excludes her as an anomaly” (Neil Gaiman).

The increasingly prescient Jackson emerges as a ferociously talented, determined, and prodigiously creative writer in a time when it was unusual for a woman to have both a family and a profession. A mother of four and the wife of the prominent New Yorker critic and academic Stanley Edgar Hyman, Jackson lived a seemingly bucolic life in the New England town of North Bennington, Vermont. Yet, much like her stories, which channeled the occult while exploring the claustrophobia of marriage and motherhood, Jackson’s creative ascent was haunted by a darker side. As her career progressed, her marriage became more tenuous, her anxiety mounted, and she became addicted to amphetamines and tranquilizers. In sobering detail, Franklin insightfully examines the effects of Jackson’s California upbringing, in the shadow of a hypercritical mother, on her relationship with her husband, juxtaposing Hyman’s infidelities, domineering behavior, and professional jealousy with his unerring admiration for Jackson’s fiction, which he was convinced was among the most brilliant he had ever encountered.

Based on a wealth of previously undiscovered correspondence and dozens of new interviews, Shirley Jackson—an exploration of astonishing talent shaped by a damaging childhood and turbulent marriage—becomes the definitive biography of a generational avatar and an American literary giant.

Max Décharné is an author, songwriter and musician. His latest book, Vulgar Tongues: An Alternative History of English Slang. One of his top ten slangy crime novels, as shared at the Guardian:

American Tabloid by James Ellroy (1995)

The blistering opening salvo in what for me is Ellroy’s masterpiece, the Underworld USA trilogy, in which all manner of clandestine operators converge on Dallas in 1963 for JFK’s assassination. Genuine historical figures blend with fictional characters, many of them talking a scattershot mixture of trade terms and creative profanity, where tough guys have stones (balls), drug addicts pop bennies (benzedrine), and dodgy deals are concluded with, “Don’t shake my hand, you’re too greasy to touch”. No one else has done it quite like this, before or since.

My reading tastes are varied. One week I’ll choose a cozy mystery, a thriller the next, or maybe even a true crime novel. I’m also a big fan of biographies, particularly historical ones that feature King Henry VIII and his wives. One book I recently read was Anne Boleyn: The Final 24 Hours by Marcella Mayfair. Anne Boleyn has always been my favorite of Henry’s wives so I was most anxious to read this book. The story is told in a minute by minute countdown which ends with her walk to the scaffold, and it describes the...[read on]

Nick and Nora aren’t just pussyfooting around this time as they deal with a missing person’s case and murder.

While catering a gala for the Cruz Museum, Nora Charles agrees to look into the disappearance of director Violet Crenshaw’s niece, a case previously undertaken by her frisky feline friend Nick’s former owner, a private eye whose whereabouts are also currently unknown.

As Nora and her curious cat Nick pull at the string of clues, they begin to unravel a twisted tale of coded messages, theft, false identities, murder, and international espionage. Nora dares to hope that the labyrinth of leads will not only help them locate the missing young woman, but also solve the disappearance of the detective. That’s if Nora can stay alive long enough to find him...

Wednesday, December 28, 2016

At B&N Reads Melissa Albert tagged sixteen of the most indispensable books of the 1950s, including:

A Good Man Is Hard to Find, by Flannery O’Connor

O’Connor’s stories, like life, are “nasty, brutish and short,” populated with tricksters, ciphers, and benighted people born into small destinies they’re unable to escape. Her stories are also darkly funny and addictively readable, each a window onto the small tragedies and even smaller minds of farm folk, drifters, and opportunists in the heartland.

The Bakeshop Mystery Series was originally pitched as the Gilmore Girls with murder. In my dream world the movie would be produced and directed by Amy Sherman-Palladino, the creator of the Gilmore Girls. I know that Sherman-Palladino would perfectly capture the setting. The Bakeshop Mysteries take place in the real town of Ashland, Oregon home to the world famous Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Ashland is tucked into the southernmost corner of the state in the Siskiyou Mountains near the border with California. It’s a thriving community of artists, playwrights, musicians, and outdoor adventure lovers. The downtown plaza is designed to resemble an old-English village with Elizabethan architecture and whimsical shops and restaurants that give a nod to Shakespeare like Oberon’s Tavern, complete with costumed staff and live minstrel music. The small hamlet transforms when the theater is in full swing during...[read on]

A bittersweet homecoming holds dark secrets in this heart-wrenching story of loss, love, and survival for readers of Room

When sixteen-year-old Amy returns home, she can’t tell her family what’s happened to her. She can’t tell them where she’s been since she and her best friend, her cousin Dee, were kidnapped six years ago—who stole them from their families or what’s become of Dee. She has to stay silent because she’s afraid of what might happen next, and she’s desperate to protect her secrets at any cost.

Amy tries to readjust to life at “home,” but nothing she does feels right. She’s a stranger in her own family, and the guilt that she’s the one who returned is insurmountable. Amy soon realizes that keeping secrets won’t change what’s happened, and they may end up hurting those she loves the most. She has to go back in order to move forward, risking everything along the way. Amy Chelsea Stacie Dee is a riveting, affecting story of loss and hope.

A historical interpretation of the diary of an eighteenth-century Jewish woman who resisted the efforts of the papal authorities to force her religious conversion

After being seized by the papal police in Rome in May 1749, Anna del Monte, a Jew, kept a diary detailing her captors’ efforts over the next thirteen days to force her conversion to Catholicism. Anna’s powerful chronicle of her ordeal at the hands of authorities of the Roman Catholic Church, originally circulated by her brother Tranquillo in 1793, receives its first English-language translation along with an insightful interpretation by Kenneth Stow of the incident’s legal and historical significance. Stow’s analysis of Anna’s dramatic story of prejudice, injustice, resistance, and survival during her two-week imprisonment in the Roman House of Converts—and her brother’s later efforts to protest state-sanctioned, religion-based abuses—provides a detailed view of the separate forces on either side of the struggle between religious and civil law in the years just prior to the massive political and social upheavals in America and Europe.

This book is not only my favorite “backwoods horror” novel, but my favorite novel—period. Maybe it’s not a straight horror story, but there’s definitely murder and creepy crawlies and strange goings-on aplenty. The backwoods element is there as well, as the story takes place in and around the town of Zephyr, Alabama, during the 1960s. I know that McCammon drew on his own childhood while writing the book, but this books feels like it was written just for me, drawing on events that happened in my own life. It’s a magical story, equal parts chilling, scary, humorous, charming, thought-provoking, and touching. Amidst all the mysterious happenings, the bizarre townsfolk, and the fiendish villains is a tale of growing up and fighting to keep the magic of childhood alive.

Some games are better without rules…especially when it comes to seduction.

Vampire Dante D'Arcangelo enjoys diversions. Especially those that involve seducing beautiful women, like newly made vampiress Kyler Cole. The curvaceous ingenue stirs Dante's deepest desires. But they share more than blistering chemistry. Dante and Kyler each seek possession of a priceless Fabergé egg containing a spell that would annihilate thousands of vampires while granting only one eternal life.

Caught up in a wickedly sexy game of cat and mouse, Dante and Kyler try to outmaneuver each other as thieves and as lovers. But when a rival steals the egg, they form a wary alliance to recover it…knowing that their delicate bond must eventually end in betrayal.

A rom-zom-com in the vein of Chuck Palahniuk, Breathers follows lovers Andy and Rita after they meet at an Undead Anonymous meeting. Breathers shun zombies, and have more or less stripped them of their civil rights, a reoccurring theme in novels of the thinking undead. When Andy and Rita are slipped human flesh by a zombie activist and begin to understand their own disenfranchisement, they are galvanized to take legal action on the part of their zombie brethren. I don’t mean to make this sound drearily political, because it’s much more quipping than monologuing. But then, both horror and comedy often belie more serious messages.

I just finished this one. I’d seen it on a couple of lists of psychological thrillers to read so I already had it on my own list of things to read when I went to a domestic suspense panel at BoucherCon in New Orleans and heard Kate speak. It moved up a few notches on my list then! She was smart and funny and irreverent. Then I ended up having dinner and drinks with her (it’s a long story that involves French 75s and a pair of wedge sandals and very kind authors making sure I didn’t fall down and got some food in my stomach to sop up the gin and champagne) and it...[read on]

Amanda Sinclair has to fight harder than most for everything she has after fleeing the cult that left her brother dead at her mother’s hand. Amanda works a quiet job in quality control for a small cosmetics company, trying to leave her past behind her—until she learns that her mother has committed suicide in the mental ward where she’s been locked away for the past ten years.

At first, Amanda believes that her mother killed herself, but when she looks through the personal belongings left behind, it seems her death may be related to the upcoming parole hearing for cult leader Patrick Collier. Teaming up with her mother’s psychologist, Amanda starts to peel away the layers of secrets that she’s built between herself and her own past, and what she finds is a truth that’s almost too big to believe.

Monday, December 26, 2016

Few people have a better understanding of passion and dedication than Winfrey. Born into poverty, she launched a career as a talk-show host, actress, and media mogul.

"What I Know for Sure" is a collection of her columns in O, the Oprah Magazine. Each one offers a different life lesson on topics including joy, gratitude, and power, often based on her personal experience.

I’ve had jobs in bookstores and libraries, and both are great places to work. Not only are you surrounded by books, but there’s the added benefit of being surrounded by interesting people—staff and patrons. And by “interesting” I mean worth studying and putting into my own books. It might be difficult (and possibly unpleasant) to ask some of those real people to drop everything and answer a casting call for a movie, though, so thank goodness there are professionals to call on. Here are my picks for the main characters and director of Plaid and Plagiarism, a mystery set in the village of Inversgail on the west coast of Scotland.

Kathy Bates as Janet Marsh, the retired American librarian who dreamed up the offbeat retirement scheme of buying a bookshop in Scotland. Janet is a planner who loves research and books. Kathy Bates will bring intelligence to the role and the right touch of humor.

Dinah Sheridan (as she was twenty or thirty years ago) as Christine Robertson. Christine is Janet’s best friend and new business partner. She’s a Scot who lived in the States for thirty years and is returning to the village where she grew up. Dinah Sheridan was a deft comic actress who...[read on]

This confession by a British Muslim girl who runs away with her best friend to join Daesh (the Arabic name for ISIS) is a novel, but it feels electrifyingly real. Jamilla and Ameena have grown up together in industrial Northern England, navigating between the precepts of Islam and the temptations of soccer players and cigarettes. Through Facebook and Twitter, they follow various preachers and Islamists; they meet young women around the world who share their religious interests. One of their contacts gradually persuades them to run away from home, join her in Syria and become jihadi brides. Every bit of illusion they have about the movement will be burned away as the disaster of this choice becomes clear.—MARION WINIK

Most people know Florence Nightingale was a compassionate and legendary nurse, but they don’t know her full story. This riveting biography explores the exceptional life of a woman who defied the stifling conventions of Victorian society to pursue what was considered an undesirable vocation. She is best known for her work during the Crimean War, when she vastly improved gruesome and deadly conditions and made nightly rounds to visit patients, becoming known around the world as the Lady with the Lamp. Her tireless and inspiring work continued after the war, and her modern methods in nursing became the defining standards still used today.

Sunday, December 25, 2016

Two macabre discoveries in a single morning present an intriguing challenge for Detective Inspector Tom Harper.

Leeds, 1893. DI Tom Harper is witnessing the demonstration of a devastating new naval weapon, the torpedo, at Roundhay Park. The explosion brings up a body in the lake, a rope lashed tightly around its waist. At the same time, a woman's severed leg floats to the surface of the River Aire. Could the two macabre discoveries be connected?

My reading of late has been much influenced by recent circumstance, both personal and public. Most of the time I live as an expat, under the shadow of a mountain in Switzerland, far from any literary establishment. I read constantly, but not strictly the most current books or ones published in North America.

This autumn, though I’ve been on book tour in the U.S. I’ve spent a lot of time in North American bookstores and around other authors. It’s difficult for me to walk away from either without a new book in hand. At the Miami Book Fair, for example, I came away with three books, including poet Ishion Hutchinson’s House of Lords and Commons. Spanning millennia, thoughts, images, and seas, this collection has made me want to dust off...[read on]

An arresting and absorbing novel that spans decades, drawing us into the turbulent lives of a family in Southern California after the sudden death of the father

Beginning in 1962 with a shocking loss, Shining Sea quickly pulls us into the lives of forty-three -year-old Michael Gannon's widow and offspring. Brilliantly described and utterly alive on the page, the Gannon clan find themselves charting paths they never anticipated, for decades to come. Told with a cinematic sweep, Shining Sea transports us from World War II to the present day, crisscrossing from the beaches of Southern California to the Woodstock rock festival, from London's gritty nightlife in the eighties to Scotland's remote Inner Hebrides, from the dry heat of Arizona to the fertile farmland of Massachusetts.

Epic, tender, and beautifully rendered, Shining Sea is the portrait of an American family-a profound depiction of the ripple effects of war, the passing down of memory, the making of myth, and the power of the ideal of heroism to lead us astray but sometimes also to keep us afloat.

This one is a new addition to the Christmas book pile, and it’s a good one that will be around for many years to come. Before he became Father Christmas, aka Santa Claus, Nikolas was a boy living a pretty dismal life of poverty in the woods of Finland. His one toy was a doll carved by his mother out of a turnip, and since she died when he was six, the turnip has lost it freshness. When his father sets off to find the land of the elves in the far north and doesn’t come back, Nikolas runs from his unkind aunt and sets off to find him. Riding on the back of a reindeer who he has saved from death, who he names Blitzen, he reaches Elfhelm, the village of the Elves, but it has become a gloomy place, and Nikolas is not wanted. To bring joy back to Elves, Nikolas must undo the harm his father has been part of, and in so doing, Nikolas finds his own calling in life—to bring joy to all the children of the world. This is a great one to read aloud. There’s lots to chuckle at, some of it a bit irreverent (Blitzen, for instance, lets loose all over the unkind aunt while flying over her), and the many illustrations add lots to the lighthearted charm of the story.

Saturday, December 24, 2016

The Feud is the deliciously ironic (and sad) tale of how two literary giants destroyed their friendship in a fit of mutual pique and egomania.

In 1940, Edmund Wilson was the undisputed big dog of American letters. Vladimir Nabokov was a near-penniless Russian exile seeking asylum in the States. Wilson became a mentor to Nabokov, introducing him to every editor of note, assigning him book reviews for The New Republic, engineering a Guggenheim Fellowship. Their intimate friendship blossomed over a shared interest in all things Russian, ruffled a bit by political disagreements. But then came the worldwide best-selling novel Lolita, and the tables were turned. Suddenly Nabokov was the big (and very rich) dog. The feud finally erupted in full when Nabokov published his hugely footnoted and virtually unreadable literal translation of Pushkin’s famously untranslatable verse novel, Eugene Onegin. Wilson attacked his friend’s translation with hammer and tongs in The New York Review of Books. Nabokov counterattacked. Back and forth the increasingly aggressive letters flew, until the narcissism of small differences reduced their friendship to ashes.

Alex Beam has fashioned this clash of literary titans into a delightful and irresistible book—a comic contretemps of a very high order and a poignant demonstration of the fragility of even the deepest of friendships.

Matt Haig's newest books include The Girl Who Saved Christmas and A Boy Called Christmas. One of the author's top ten Christmas books, as shared at the Guardian:

The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen

This is one of the most poignant stories ever told, about a poor girl selling matches in the cold and dying from hypothermia. On New Year’s Eve the girl lights matches to warm herself and in the flame sees visions of a Christmas tree and a holiday feast. The ending is devastating, even though Andersen believed it to be a happy one, as the girl ends in heaven. But it is an unforgettable tale, about the power of imagination to warm us like fire, and fits the Christmas spirit perfectly in the sense of us needing light and hope amid the dark of winter.

Jessie is asked by Hollywood actress Mary Pickford if she can do some private investigating. A girl was found stabbed in her bedroom with her housemate lying unconscious next to her, a bloody knife in her hand. Jessie must hone her amateur detective skills and travel through twenties Hollywood to prove the girls innocence before she hangs.

Friday, December 23, 2016

I’m currently reading the script of Nell Gwynn by Jessica Swale, an award-winning play performed at the Globe Theatre. I only wish...[read on]

About Dark Stars, from the publisher:

The Great Fire has reduced London to smouldering embers. From the ashes, thief taker Charlie Tuesday is drawn to investigate a string of strange murders. Mutilated corpses are washing up at Deptford, each marked with a dire astrological prediction. But only London’s best crime-solver realises the killer’s deadly offerings will soon unleash a devastating force on England.

With the help of Lily Boswell, a gypsy street-girl with a knife and a grudge, Charlie must find the killer and put a stop to the murders. And by doing so, the Thief Taker will find the man whose terrible destiny is entwined with his, their fates written in the dark stars…

Great Expectations opens on Christmas Eve, as orphaned Pip visits the graves of his parents and siblings. While there, he’s accosted by a recently escaped convict, who bullies Pip into stealing food and a file to get rid of his handcuffs. Later, instead of thanking Pip for his help, the convict gets violent, and Pip runs home to spend Christmas Day stewing in guilt over the whole affair. Life gradually improves when Pip starts visiting creepy Miss Havisham, falls in love with her ward Estella, and starts receiving money from a mysterious benefactor, but still. Not the best holiday memory for a seven-year-old.

I'm a visual writer. I need pictures. In fact, when creating a story I generally start with pictures of faces and the story grows from there. I'm also addicted to Pinterest. This works well for me because there I can create 'boards' for each of my stories and fill it with the images that inspire them.

For A Venetian Vampire the role of the vampire hero Dante D'Arcangelo would go to Rupert Friend. Shave his hair micro-short and dye it black, put him in a tailored Italian suit, pop in some fangs, and he's the guy.

A young girl recounts a nightmarish Christmas. After a day spent at her grandparents, a scene of frenzied domestic violence ensues, the father attacking the mother for her sly laugh. Somehow in the fray the young girl and her raggedy doll (a present from Grandma) get tossed across the room. The Christmas tree topples, ornaments smashing everywhere. The girl’s leg is broken, her raggedy doll bleeding from the head. The mother backs off the husband with a pistol and plunges drunkenly out the door, driving into a blizzard, inching the care through snowdrifts, slaloming on iced-over roads. At a hospital bright with Christmas decorations and a tree surrounded by beautifully wrapped presents that don’t have anything in them, a desperate mother without insurance information, worried that she’s been treated like white trash, draws her gun as she demands that someone, anyone, help her wounded child.

Thursday, December 22, 2016

Three things, as usual. I like to have one big ongoing project, and right now it’s the Library of America’s four-volume set called “The Civil War, told by those who lived it.” Beautifully produced, as always, a pleasure to the hand and eye as well as the brain. I’m near the end of volume one. It’s a...[read on]

A murder leads Sarah Burke to investigate a money-laundering ring with connections extending far beyond Tucson – but does the key to solving the case lie closer to home than she realises?

The murder of a man seen fighting in a house during a Fourth of July street parade plunges Sarah Burke's whole household – her fragile mother Aggie, shrewd and ever-helpful live-in boyfriend Will and even her hard-charging niece, Denny – into her latest case.

The investigation leads to a money-laundering ring with international connections, and Sarah and her smart, hard-working crew of detectives must follow the puzzle, set against the backdrop of Tucson's unique character – an ancient, beautiful valley with a polyglot ethnic community and a bilingual, modern city – without knowing where it might take them. Could the answers lie closer to home than she realises?

Nick and Nora aren’t just pussyfooting around this time as they deal with a missing person’s case and murder.

While catering a gala for the Cruz Museum, Nora Charles agrees to look into the disappearance of director Violet Crenshaw’s niece, a case previously undertaken by her frisky feline friend Nick’s former owner, a private eye whose whereabouts are also currently unknown.

As Nora and her curious cat Nick pull at the string of clues, they begin to unravel a twisted tale of coded messages, theft, false identities, murder, and international espionage. Nora dares to hope that the labyrinth of leads will not only help them locate the missing young woman, but also solve the disappearance of the detective. That’s if Nora can stay alive long enough to find him...

Donoghue’s story of a young boy called Jack and his resourceful ma, held captive and forced to exist solely in “Room”, is a very different kind of escape novel. Told entirely from the innocent point of view of Jack, who has no experience of the outside world, the escape itself is a gruelling moment as we desperately hope that this confused and vulnerable child will be able to save himself and his mother. But what really makes this novel so distinct is its depiction of the aftermath; there is no immediate fist-in-the-air triumph, but a long and difficult struggle to return to normality after a traumatic event.

Many early modern poets and playwrights were also members of the legal societies the Inns of Court and these authors shaped the development of key genres of the English Renaissance, especially lyric poetry, dramatic tragedy, satire, and masque. But how did the Inns come to be literary centers in the first place, and why were they especially vibrant at particular times? Early modernists have long understood that urban setting and institutional environment were central to this phenomenon: in the vibrant world of London, educated men with time on their hands turned to literary pastimes for something to do. Lawyers at Play proposes an additional, more essential dynamic: the literary culture of the Inns intensified in decades of profound transformation in the legal profession. Focusing on the first decade of Elizabeth's reign, the period when a large literary network first developed around the societies, this study demonstrates that the literary surge at this time developed out of and responded to a period of rapid expansion in the legal profession and in the career prospects of members. Poetry, translation, and performance were recreational pastimes; however, these activities also defined and elevated the status of inns-of-court men as qualified, learned, and ethical participants in England's "legal magistracy": those lawyers, judges, justices of the peace, civic office holders, town recorders, and gentleman landholders who managed and administered local and national governance of England. Lawyers at Play maps the literary terrain of a formative but understudied period in the English Renaissance, but it also provides the foundation for an argument that goes beyond the 1560s to provide a framework for understanding the connections between the literary and legal cultures of the Inns over the whole of the early modern period.

Wednesday, December 21, 2016

I'm reading Simon Goldhill’s A Very Queer Family Indeed: Sex, Religion, and the Bensons in Victorian Britain. The patriarch of the family, Edward White Benson, presided over a household in which not only all of his children, but also his wife, were involved in various ways in aspects of same-sex desire. From the sharing of beds to the publication of coded novels the members of the Benson family wrestled with the complexities of emotional and sexual desires that were widely reviled and misunderstood at the time. This situation was made all the more difficult by Edward Benson’s job. From 1883 to 1896 he was archbishop of Canterbury and, therefore, one of the most prominent and respectable subjects of Queen Victoria at a time when...[read on]

“I do not say you are it, but you look it, and you pose at it, which is just as bad,” Lord Queensbury challenged Oscar Wilde in the courtroom—which erupted in laughter—accusing Wilde of posing as a sodomite. What was so terrible about posing as a sodomite, and why was Queensbury’s horror greeted with such amusement? In Oscar Wilde Prefigured, Dominic Janes suggests that what divided the two sides in this case was not so much the question of whether Wilde was or was not a sodomite, but whether or not it mattered that people could appear to be sodomites. For many, intimations of sodomy were simply a part of the amusing spectacle of sophisticated life.

Oscar Wilde Prefigured is a study of the prehistory of this “queer moment” in 1895. Janes explores the complex ways in which men who desired sex with men in Britain had expressed such interests through clothing, style, and deportment since the mid-eighteenth century. He supplements the well-established narrative of the inscription of sodomitical acts into a homosexual label and identity at the end of the nineteenth century by teasing out the means by which same-sex desires could be signaled through visual display in Georgian and Victorian Britain. Wilde, it turns out, is not the starting point for public queer figuration. He is the pivot by which Georgian figures and twentieth-century camp stereotypes meet. Drawing on the mutually reinforcing phenomena of dandyism and caricature of alleged effeminates, Janes examines a wide range of images drawn from theater, fashion, and the popular press to reveal new dimensions of identity politics, gender performance, and queer culture.

Amanda Sinclair has to fight harder than most for everything she has after fleeing the cult that left her brother dead at her mother’s hand. Amanda works a quiet job in quality control for a small cosmetics company, trying to leave her past behind her—until she learns that her mother has committed suicide in the mental ward where she’s been locked away for the past ten years.

At first, Amanda believes that her mother killed herself, but when she looks through the personal belongings left behind, it seems her death may be related to the upcoming parole hearing for cult leader Patrick Collier. Teaming up with her mother’s psychologist, Amanda starts to peel away the layers of secrets that she’s built between herself and her own past, and what she finds is a truth that’s almost too big to believe.

One entry on Christopher Charles's list of the top ten literary detective novels, as shared at The Strand Magazine:

The Pledge, Friedrich Dürrenmatt

The body of this novel takes the form of a story narrated by a retired detective to an author of crime fiction. The detective’s goal is to demonstrate how far-fetched most crime novels are. Setting aside the meta-commentary on the genre, the story itself is a compelling account of a detective whose obsession with a case leads him into increasingly murky moral terrain. The spare, straightforward prose contrasts nicely with the narrator’s spiraling mental state (the Joel Agee translation is excellent).

When I began writing the character of Cait Morgan I have to admit I didn’t model her on any Hollywood actresses, because I wanted her to be a “real-sized” middle-aged woman…and there aren’t a lot of them on our screens. Cait was born and raised in Wales and is thoroughly Welsh in every respect, despite the fact she’s been living in Canada for more than a decade. I’ve never heard a convincing Welsh accent from a non-Welsh person, so I’m going to hope Catherine Zeta Jones (who’s from the same place in Wales as me – and Cait – the wonderful city of Swansea) is prepared to pile on the pounds (Cait’s 180lbs – give or take ten pounds or so) and take the part. Hey - with all that extra weight and her fabulous acting abilities she might stand a chance of winning another Oscar!

Casting Bud Anderson is an easier job, because I did, in fact, have an actor’s face in mind when I was writing the...[read on]